attended. Of greater interest is the scenery which contributed so
much to his education and aided his development into England's
greatest nature poet.

We learn from his autobiographical poem, _The Prelude_, what
experiences molded him in boyhood. He says that the--

"...common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things."

In this poem he relates how he absorbed into his inmost being the
orange sky of evening, the curling mist, the last autumnal crocus, the
"souls of lonely places," and the huge peak, which terrified him at
nightfall by seeming to stride after him and which awoke in him a--

"...dim and undermined sense
Of unknown modes of being."

[Illustration: BOY OF WINANDER. _From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C._]

In his famous lines on the "Boy of Winander," Wordsworth tells how--

"...the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."

At the age of seventeen he entered Cambridge University, from which he
was graduated after a four years' course. He speaks of himself there
as a dreamer passing through a dream. There came to him the strange
feeling that he "was not for that hour nor for that place;" and yet he
says that he was not unmoved by his daily association with the haunts
of his illustrious predecessors, or of--

"Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,"

and of Milton whose soul seemed to Wordsworth "like a star."

Influence of the French Revolution.--His travels on the continent in
his last vacation and after his graduation brought him in contact with
the French Revolution, of which he felt the inspiring influence. He
was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant
girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become
an ardent revolutionist. _The Prelude_ tells in concrete fullness how
he walked along the banks of the Loire with his friend, a French
patriot:--

"...And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fitting her languid gait
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the s